Check out our picks for recent great lean reads from across the web below! What are your picks for good articles or videos worth sharing? Please add them in the comments below.
1. Why Product Thinking is the Next Big Thing in UX Design by Nikkel Blaase
What Nikkel Blaase calls “product thinking” sounds like sound lean advice applied to user design. “When thinking in products, UX designers should be able to answer the following questions first: What problem do we solve? (User problem). For whom are we doing this? (Target audience). Why are we doing this? (Vision).” Next, he says come strategy and goal-setting. “Only then it makes sense to think about what exactly we are doing (Features).” While the article may not break new ground, it offers a helpful framework for letting the value-creating product drive your decisions.
2. Best Practices: How Lean Practices Can Slash Hospital Reduction Costs, by Maureen McKinney in Modern Healthcare
“Four years ago, the leaders of Akron (Ohio) Children’s Hospital faced a pressing question as they began planning a new facility to house their neonatal intensive-care unit, outpatient surgery and other growing service lines,” writes Maureen McKinney. “Should they undertake such a major capital project through traditional design and construction methods, or take a risk and try a new approach that could save money and produce a better result?” McKinney’s article is a great, quick example of how lean methods made a huge difference on a specific project benefitting all players involved.
3. The Employer-Led Healthcare Revolution by Patricia A. McDonald, Robert S. Mecklenburg, and Lindsay A. Martin in Harvard Business Review
“To tame its soaring health care costs, Intel tried many popular approaches: ‘consumer-driven health care’ offerings such as high-deductible/low-premium plans, on-site clinics, and employee wellness programs. But by 2009 Intel realized that those programs alone would not enable the company to solve the problem, because they didn’t affect its root cause: the steadily rising cost of the care employees and their families were receiving,” says HBR. Read what Intel did instead, in part by learning from Virginia Mason Medical Center.
4. Economics Gets Real by Noah Smith for Bloomberg View
While business is benefitting from a more rigorous application of the scientific method (PDCA), economics seems to be turning more and more to science as well. “Empirical papers are taking over from theoretical papers in the economic literature, and the methods used for untangling cause and effect are getting more and more scientific,” writes Noah Smith. “The big driver is information technology, which has made the entire world into economists’ laboratory.”
